La Villette hosts the exhibition 100% L’EXPO from April 10 to May 11, 2025.
Seven artists graduated from Villa Arson have been selected to participate in this exhibition: Léo Dupré, Valentine Gardiennet, Emika Lannelongue, Carlota Sandoval-Lizarralde, Romain Ravera, Sofia Rocha Mondragon and Murphy Yum.
Léo Dupré
Nourished by legends, Léo Dupré’s soft sculptures appear as gateways to occult trips. His sinuous works are decorated with a collection of small objects, either handmade or recovered. These evolve throughout the life of the work and act as talismans announcing the universe it conceals. The thick, brightly colored fleece canvases woven by Léo are the padded totems of a New Hell – a happy hell – around which to gather. In this post-apocalyptic context, he is interested in the aesthetics of outdoor equipment and its survivalist connotation, useful for traversing the lores he projects.
Valentine Gardiennet
Valentine Gardiennet graduated from Villa Arson in Nice in 2020 and is a resident at the Wonder workshops in Clichy. Her installations blend physical manufacturing techniques ranging from molding to modeling and ceramic processing, with improvised manufacturing techniques from a DIY system such as papier-mâché, chicken wire, or silicone. In a game of scale oscillating between enlargement and shrinkage, Valentine Gardiennet transposes her notebook drawings into three-dimensional objects, mischievously subverting the elements of reality that inhabit our daily lives. She deploys in space a universally understandable vocabulary through scenes with popular references from television series, comics, and fairy tales.
Emika Lannelongue
Emika Lannelongue, currently based in Paris, graduated from the National School of Art at Villa Arson in 2022. Her work revolves around the connections between memory and recording, exploring these notions primarily through the photographic medium. Emika questions the multiple facets of this medium, particularly its ability to capture, freeze, or transform memories, while playing with its technical and formal limits. By blending personal and collective narratives, she creates works that invite deep reflection on these themes. Continuing her research, Emika enriches her visual universe by experimenting with new narrative forms, while emphasizing the intimacy and subtlety of the stories she tells.
Carlota Sandoval Lizarralde
Born in 1996, of Colombian nationality, Carlota Sandoval Lizarralde lives and works in Paris. In 2021, she graduated from ENSA Villa Arson (Nice) and won the Pierre Cardin Prize in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts. She has benefited from residencies at the Cité internationale des arts (2024, Paris), Ateliers Médicis (2024, Aude), Consulat Voltaire (2023, Paris), Maison Artagon (2023, Loiret) and Villa Belleville (2022, Paris). Since September 2024, she has been a resident at Artagon Pantin. In 2025, she participates in 100% La Villette and exhibits again at Magasins Généraux as well as at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles as a finalist for the Carré sur Seine Prize. Her second solo exhibition “Let the Hand Pick” will be visible until May 4 in the Project Room of Le Plateau at Frac Ile-de-France, invited by Maëlle Dault. Carlota Sandoval Lizarralde is one of the five laureates of the Hôtel de Craon residency in La Rochelle, funded by the Encore endowment funds.
Romain Ravera
Graduated from Villa Arson in 2023, Romain Ravera has established his studio in the industrial area of Contes (near Nice, where he is from), an environment from which he draws his resources and aesthetics. The 26-year-old artist builds his entire plastic vocabulary from lived objects, stolen from urban peripheries, industrial zones, wastelands, and demolition sites. As if he could still observe in these places, the ruins of our contemporary societies.
Sofia Rocha Mondragon
Sofia Rocha Mondragon was born in Mexico City in 2000. She develops a practice around painting, which is seduced by other mediums, such as ceramics and installation. The artist’s imagination is rooted in personal references and her memory, as well as in the stories that clothed her childhood. Her compositions are sprinkled with borrowings from Pop(ular) culture, literature, the digital world, and painting. She positions her images as descendants of magical realism, exploring the bittersweet sensation of memory becoming fantasy. Through transparencies, masks, and patterns, she attempts to create a universe on the border between reality and her own fantasy. She seeks to give an active role to the viewer in the exhibition space and also questions the role that the hanging can give to the canvases to create interactions between them and thus create new narratives.
Murphy Yum
Graduated in 2021 from Villa Arson, Murphy Yum lives and works between Ardèche and Muju (South Korea). When her installations encounter a tragic gaze, a perceptual gap is created, forming a hidden refuge where personal emotions unfold freely. This tension projects intimate narratives onto the installation, questioning collective memory and social norms. She explores the impact of clumsy and exhausted objects on the individual and civilization, using low-tech methods to redefine their scope. Attracted by the vibrations of disorder—a form of ‘domestic diaspora’—she seeks a balance between chaos and structure. In these moving installations, Murphy collects and manipulates images from shop windows, flyers, and the internet to explore ‘false nostalgia,’ where fragile memories are artificially revived through familiar objects. Her work proposes a fluid and non-hierarchical perception of the world, freed from fixed perspectives.
100% L’EXPO
Neither a contemporary art fair nor a thematic exhibition, 100% L’EXPO is conceived as a non-exhaustive snapshot of young creation, presenting a plurality of profiles and subjects in each new edition. The works of about forty artists are displayed over more than 3,500 m2 in the Grande Halle de la Villette, in a scenography entirely composed of recycled elements from previous events. Each year, La Villette collaborates with French art schools to present recently graduated artists.
With the desire to present the emerging scene more broadly, 100% L’EXPO formulates invitations each year to collectives, festivals, residency spaces, and media to show the diversity and richness of a contemporary art ecosystem designed by and for young creation. This year, the two highlights are on April 12 with an invitation to the media Manifesto XXI for the release of their review ‘How to love when it’s the end of the world?’ and a big weekend of performances on April 19 and 20.
The selection of artists
The selection of artists was made by a jury composed of Cédric Fauq, chief curator at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Flora Fettah, art critic and independent curator, Shivay La Multiple, artist who participated in the 2023 edition of 100% L’EXPO, and Inès Geoffroy, head of exhibition projects at La Villette and exhibition curator.
For more information, visit the La Villette website.
